Twine 2.1.0, the next version of the application, is in beta and should see a final release by the end of the year. Although the version number is only moving from 2.0 to 2.1, it will be a significant update.

First, it will included upgraded versions of the built-in Harlowe and SugarCube story formats. Story formats are the software which power Twine stories in a web browser — once you finish editing and publish your story to an HTML file, they take over and turn your story into a playable web page.

Because both of these new versions have backwards-incompatible changes, they will be opt-in. Existing stories will continue to work the same as they did with Twine 2.0, but you can change over when you’re ready to take advantage of the bug fixes and improvements in the new versions. (You’ll be able to do so by choosing Change Story Format from the story menu when editing; the new versions, Harlowe 2.0.0 and SugarCube 2.11.0, will appear in the list along with their 1.x versions.)

The inner workings of the application have been significantly rewritten so that they’re faster and more reliable. If you’ve been frustrated with how slowly Twine 2.0 opens when you add large stories, 2.1 will make you happy.

Last but not least, the user interface is a little sleeker now, and a dark theme has been added to help when you’re working in low lighting.

The upgrade process will be easy. If you use Twine online at twinery.org, it’ll become available the day of the release. Otherwise, you’ll just have to download the new version and install it. Your existing stories will be transitioned to the new version just fine.

To keep up-to-date on the upcoming release and other Twine-related information, follow @twinethreads on Twitter.

Future Directions for Twine

A Twine committee has been recently formed by the foundation, and we’ve set some goals for ourselves for the coming year.

First, we’re going to improve the documentation available for Twine. People have come up with a lot of documentation for Twine, but a lot of is scattered over the web, which makes it difficult to locate. We’re going to explore how to make it easier to find these resources and how we can encourage more documentation to be created.

Second, we’re going to help preserve works created in Twine. Just like documentation, people have posted their Twine stories and games in a countless number of places, many of them relatively ephemeral like Dropbox and Google Drive. We want to find ways to ensure those works remain accessible for a long time to come.

Finally, we’re going to explore migrating some of the infrastructure supporting Twine under the IFTF umbrella. We’ll start with the official web site and go from there.